Happy birthday last week, Abraham Lincoln! It seems like only 150 years ago that your decisions led to the bloodiest war in American history, the complete shredding of our beloved Constitution and the utter destruction of what was meant to be the most beautiful republic to have ever existed.
Conservative critics of Lincoln’s administration are usually given the same response: “Why would you hate someone who freed the slaves?”
Many columnists, like Paul Krugman, have written that conservatives began themselves from Lincoln when they were trying to “seek votes from Southerners angered by the end of legal segregation.”
Because, God knows, all of us who are waiting for the collapse of government just can’t wait to march streets and burn crosses with our fellow Aryans.
Oh well. It’s to be expected.
People will tend to pull out the racist card when Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era are criticized. The racist card is kind of like having a poker hand consisting of a Jack, Queen, King, Ace and 2. Sure, that 2 looks pretty, and many people will try to insist that it’s a straight, but, in the end, it’s worthless.
I feel that it’s important to give thanks to Abraham Lincoln in terms of what he did for the United States. And, in saying that, I will now list off my critiques to five myths in regard to his fabulous presidency, one for each of the 140,000 Americans he killed by perpetrating an unnecessary war.
1. Abraham Lincoln cared greatly about the emancipation of slaves, and he did what he had to in order to accomplish this.
Lincoln completely disapproved of slavery; that’s not the argument. However, when it came time to decide whether he’d rather preserve the Union or abolish slavery, the Union stamped on that scale like an elephant next to a feather. In an 1862 letter to the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln wrote: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it […].”
The containment of sovereign states into an unstable abstraction of unity was more important to him than the freedom of blacks.
After all, the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t a morality-based executive order but merely an act of warfare. Like militaries used to spray poisons over their enemies’ crops to starve the soldiers, Lincoln knew that, without slaves, the South had no economy. And, without an economy, they couldn’t pay for the war.
The inclusion of this fact when analyzing Lincoln’s decisions makes everything seem much clearer.
2. The North was completely innocent and the South was completely unjust.
You’d have to be a child to believe that everyone in the South supported slavery. Even Confederate General Robert E. Lee believed that the institution of slavery was, as he put it in a letter to his wife, “a moral and political evil in any country.”
If you do believe that everyone in the South supported slavery, you’d also have to believe, in order to remain consistent, that every Afghan and Iraqi fighting against our occupation is on the side of the Taliban as opposed to fighting for sovereignty in dealing with their own problems.
You can’t expect a local population to fight against slavery when the Union army is slaughtering innocent local civilians.
3. The actions taken by Lincoln were legal under the Constitution.
Let’s just put it this way: if Lincoln’s term had ended in 2001, Bush could have suitably run on the Libertarian Party’s ticket.
Lincoln invaded a sovereign republic. He imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissenters in the North.
He suspended the writ of habeus corpus. He shut down hundreds of newspapers with military force. He created an income tax. He had an elected congressman deported to the South.
He intimidated voters at the polls. He forced men to die in a war with military conscription. He added the puppet state of West Virginia to the Union. He arrested Maryland’s neutral legislature, dragging them unwillingly into a war.
4. Slavery would still exist if we didn’t fight the Civil War. There was no other way to get rid of it.
Let the South secede, and then have Congress repeal the Fugitive Slave Act. Since manumission was illegal in many areas in the South, promote the purchasing of slaves by Northerners for temporary indentured servitude.
Take down all tariffs so the South wouldn’t feel compelled to use such cheap labor.
Tell companies to compete for public opinion with food labeled “slave-free produce” (they actually did this), much like organic farmers do these days.
There are other ways that could have gotten rid of slavery much quicker.
5. Tariffs had nothing to do with either the South’s desire to secede or the existence of slavery.
The plans for secession that began immediately after Lincoln’s election is something that people like to point out.
Lincoln had promoted the abolition of slavery before his presidency, therefore correlations were made and incorrect causations were drawn from those correlations.
One correlation that everyone tends to forget is that Lincoln was a railroad attorney.
He sought to give taxpayer subsidies to large railroad corporations, uphold strict protective tariffs in order to protect American industries from failing — read: keep American consumers from paying low prices — and promote a national bank like the current — ugh — Federal Reserve.
In pondering the alternative ways of abolishing slavery, let us now think how to get rid of government, because, really, slaves and slave-owners maintain a direct parallel with citizens and government.
Reach Brian at brian.p.anderson@asu.edu
